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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

Jobs weren’t difficult to find in the early 1960s. Tichauer lived in West Vancouver. He landed a job just up the highway at Britannia mine, which was still very much the Howe Sound company town it had been in its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s as the largest copper mine in the then-British Empire.

Like many of British Columbia’s major early industrial mines, Britannia got its start after a series of gold rushes that began in the Fraser River system in 1858 before spreading east and north to Rossland and Barkerville.

Those early prospecting opportunities threw open the door to waves of European and Asian adventurers across the British Columbia mainland — mining, not fish, furs or timber, was the catalyst for the settlement of the province.

Cumberland, on Vancouver Island, was one of B.C.’s earliest mining towns, with a coal mine from the late 1880s until 1966.

But it was gold that pulled prospectors to Yale in the Fraser Canyon, to wild and woolly Barkerville in the Cariboo, to Granby, Kimberley, Rossland and Trail — and to the serious business of building industrial-scale mines and smelters.

Gold prospectors were the first on the scene at Britannia, but it was an abundance of copper that led — by 1905 — to the development of a mine and a company town accessible only by ship.

There were good times and rough times.

An avalanche in March 1915 killed 60 men, women and children, and a landslide in 1921 claimed 37 lives.

The mine closed for a few years, but by 1963 — with copper prices improving on world markets — new owner Anaconda Mining was taking it on a final run that would last until 1974.

“I lived in the bunkhouse here. It cost me $20 a month. There was two men to a room and you were still responsible for your own food,” Tichauer recalled.

“I started out as a sampler underground. I used to have to take a sample of the rock and bring it out to the assay lab. Then I was a geologist’s helper, then an engineer’s helper — went up through the ranks.

“I was the mine rescue captain here for a while. I was a mine clerk and worked in the warehouse. I was a safety officer and employment officer when I left — and I was only 27 at the time.”

In the course of nine years at Britannia, Tichauer also met and married his wife, Marianne. They had two children and eventually moved to Squamish.

When they lived in a company house in Britannia, Tichauer made $1,200 a month and paid monthly rent of $120.

“There were advantages to living here. There was community spirit. When we had a dance, everybody went. The company was good for the community. They sponsored a lot of adult education programs. They would bring in the instructors and all that stuff. If you passed, they paid the whole shot.

“We had floor hockey teams, baseball, and then of course people would go skiing. There was fishing out front. There were hikers’ cabins at the top.”

Today, with its iconic 20-storey milling building overlooking the Sea to Sky Highway, Britannia is a National Heritage Site.

It’s also host to the award-winning Britannia Mine Museum — although the road to its current status was bumpy.

When they departed for good in 1974, the miners who had worked Britannia for three-quarters of a century left behind 240 kilometres of tunnels threading through the mountain.

When Anaconda closed the mine it walked away from a problem that turned Britannia into an international poster child for environmental disaster: acid mine drainage.

Streams running through the mountain, fed by rain and snow, were combining with residual sulphides in the rock to form an acid that leached copper and other metals into the water.

The resulting streams were toxic enough to kill fish, and their outfall in Howe Sound was a marine dead zone.

It was more than just a problem for Howe Sound. The public’s lingering impression of Britannia was that mining was ultimately a Pandora’s box and that any mine’s eventual legacy would be a long-term environmental disaster.

It took until 2001 for researchers working through the University of British Columbia’s mining department to plug one of two streams running out of the mountain, narrowing the pollution source to a single, manageable stream, and until 2005 for the province to finance a water treatment facility that precipitates all the metal — up to a half-tonne a day — out of the water and traps it in a sludge that’s removed from the site.

The treatment facility, by some estimates, will need to operate for a millennium.

After the pollution abated, the transformation of Britannia into a museum to celebrate B.C.’s mining industry began in earnest.

Last year, the Canadian Museum Association honoured Britannia Mining Museum with an award for outstanding achievement in facility development and design.

“There are other [mining] museums in B.C.,” Britannia museum executive director Kirsten Clausen said. “But it’s fair to say we are the largest museum functioning on an industrial site in British Columbia, possibly in Western Canada.

“The turnaround for Britannia, and for the museum, and for our ability to engage visitors around the story and relevance and importance of our history, was the remediation effort.”

It is an issue the museum does not avoid, Clausen said.

“A museum shouldn’t be anything less than a safe place to discuss and explore things. You try to find a way to do all the perspectives. When I speak to my board, who are a great number of industry leaders, they value that, too.

“That’s not to say there aren’t conversations around how you portray some of the more difficult subjects but certainly the museum’s board and industry leaders respect that you can’t ignore that as a value.”

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